When career sparks fly

How high-tech batteries launched Moto counsel

As government officials ramp up enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, corporate general counsels are being drawn closer to top management.

“One of the ways I like to think of myself is as a businessperson with a law degree,” says Motorola Solutions Inc.'s Lewis Steverson, estimating that up to 40 percent of his work isn't strictly legal-oriented. “The law department, the way we run it now, we're very much a business partner.”

Foreign compliance is high on Mr. Steverson's menu because the firm counts heavily on government contracts here and abroad. Of Motorola's compliance process, he says: “We've taken it from a manual, laborious process and we've automated it. If you're in sales in Dubai, you can't enter into a third-party contract without filling out all the forms, and that goes up through an approval process.”

Mr. Steverson's career ascended on the unfortunate tendency of lithium-ion batteries to catch fire—the same technology that has grounded Boeing Co.'s 787 Dreamliner.

In the 1990s, as a litigator in Arnold & Porter LLP's Denver office, he was dispatched to Atlanta and assigned to client Motorola Inc. “as a sort of rent-a-lawyer” when its lithium-ion-powered cellphones were disintegrating.

“He made a lot of tough calls around that,” says Maryann Clifford, a former Moto lawyer and now London-based group ethics and compliance officer at energy giant BP PLC.

According to Motorola, Mr. Steverson convinced the Consumer Product Safety Commission that Motorola batteries weren't faulty—the problem was the incompatibility of other brands with Moto's phones. Then he convinced the Federal Trade Commission that a Motorola-only battery requirement was a safety precaution, not a restraint of trade.

“I got down there, and I liked them and they liked me. I liked the kind of work I was doing much better than being a litigator in a law firm,” Mr. Steverson says, foreshadowing his decision to join Motorola in 1995 and relocate to its Schaumburg headquarters.

'EVOLVING'

The job change resonated with Mr. Steverson's father, also named Lewis, who was New York's first black state trooper and later head of Gov. Mario Cuomo's security detail. Next to his service revolver, a Motorola two-way radio was his father's most trusted piece of equipment, “his lifeline back to headquarters,” his son says.

When Motorola split in 2011, Mr. Steverson, 49, became general counsel of Motorola Solutions, a role with strategic overtones, he says, “because we're evolving as a company.”

Free of the mobile phone business that was sold to Google Inc., Motorola Solutions must protect its turf as the dominant provider of two-way radios and other public-safety equipment while filling out its portfolio of business-computing products and services; in October it bought London-based Psion PLC for $200 million.

CEO Greg Brown “will bring the issues to bounce things off me . . . because he knows me so well and, I guess, he trusts my judgment,” Mr. Steverson says. “The head of strategy (Kelly Mark) literally sits right next to me.”